by Jeremy Matthews

Created on: April 25, 2010

Not so long ago, in a computer lab near your house or local school teachers were telling students of floppy disks and floppy disk drives.  Several years later these same students would proceed to enter high school or their early college years and would be required to use ZIP Drives and ZIP disks for storing their data.  Now, the running norm is USB Flash Drives.  What is the big draw to use flash drives?

Easy, the world we live in is very much a digital age.  I work in an industry in which technology is very prevalent, I use Flash Drive for moving large amounts of client data back and forth between computers and for running rescue utilities straight off of the USB Flash Drive.  For me, flash drives are convenient, small, and life savers.  For other people, the need may be very different.  For example, a photographer may use flash drives to backup and archive their digital photos to save hard drive space.  A student may use a flash drive to carry their research paper to and from school so they can work on it while being mobile.  In in some cases, the average computer nerd may even use a flash drive to boot an entire operating system from instead of carrying around a laptop.

Flash drives are used via an empty USB port on just about any computer.  Flash drives are pretty small; and due to being pocketsized, they are very portable and pretty cheap.  In most cases you can pickup at least a 2 Gigabyte flash drive for $10 to $15 dollars.  And if you're lucky you can pickup a larger capacity drive for pretty cheap from some online retailers.  Flash drives are being used more everyday.  There are many uses for these handy devices, some of which stem purely from a data backup situation all the way up to being used a media players.  That's right, there are some car stereo systems which have USB slot and when plugged in, the stereo will detect and music files on the drive and play them back as if they were playing off of an iPod or other media player.

As you can see, there are numerous uses for USB Flash Drives, and their versatility is one of the huge factors in deciding to use a flash drive.  For someone who doesn't need a lot of storage space, but needs enough to back several hundred pictures or important documents a flash drive is a true life saver!

Learn more about this author, Jeremy Matthews.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.